Cowboys Cling to Their Preseason California Circus, for Now

Dallas receiver Dez Bryant after a scrimmage in Oxnard, Calif., where the first fan showed up 14 hours before the Cowboys opened camp last month.

Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 10, 2013

OXNARD, Calif. — Linebacker Justin Durant said he was not sure what to think when he arrived at his first training camp with the Dallas Cowboys to see rows of white tents and three 18-wheelers full of merchandise.

He had always prepared for a season in the same site he used all year, so a California hotel transformed into something resembling a county fair was puzzling.

“When I saw this whole setup, I said, Man, they might have a Ferris wheel,” said Durant, who also played for Jacksonville and Detroit. “They’re going to have to, you know, get some cotton candy and all that type of stuff.”

The Cowboys have spent the preseason in California off and on for 50 years, and they are the only team that travels more than one state from home. Getting away from headquarters used to be a rite of camp in the N.F.L., but now two-thirds of the teams stay put, in part because they’ve spent millions on practice sites that can give fans a place to watch.

Dallas could be next on that list, with the franchise reportedly in final negotiations for a new site in North Texas with enough land to handle what goes on now: thousands of fans lining the fences surrounding two practice fields and screaming for autographs.

Even if that happens, it won’t be easy for the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, to stop going west. He has one more year on his current deal with Oxnard, about an hour northwest of Los Angeles, and he sounds as if he wants to continue.

“I don’t think it’s a bygone time for the Cowboys,” Jones said. “This is kind of business as usual in my mind, coming out here. I really look at it as part of our legacy.”

Teams holding training camp away from home date to the early days of the N.F.L. in the 1920s. According to Pro-Football-Reference.com, the Giants held camp in Lake Ariel, Pa., in 1926, after training in New York in 1925. In the 1950s, the Giants went to Salem, Ore., three times.

The Cowboys moved training camp around their first three years because they were following the money. They trained for their inaugural season in Oregon and played a preseason game in Pendleton, which the former player personnel director Gil Brandt said had a population of 10,000 at the time.

It may seem impossible to imagine now in a billion-dollar industry, but a $25,000 appearance fee was a big deal in 1960.

“The feeling was that you couldn’t sell 10 weeks of game tickets in cities, so you played in these alternate cities,” Brandt said.

Jones ended a 27-year Cowboys run in Thousand Oaks, a few miles south of Oxnard, when he moved camp to Texas for the first time in 1990. That was a year after he bought the team and cut ties with Tom Landry and Tex Schramm, the only coach and general manager the team had known.

Eventually, Jones came to understand why Landry and Schramm liked the Southern California coast so much — sunny days with virtually no chance of rain or a temperature above the 80s.

The Cowboys returned in 2004, this time to Oxnard, where the highs have been in the 60s and low 70s. That’s nearly 40 degrees cooler than it was last week in the Dallas area, where the Cowboys do not have an indoor complex.

The first Dallas fan showed up 14 hours before the opening workout of camp in Oxnard last month.

Gates — yes, they even have turnstiles — open four hours before practice, and music blares from an area near the fields while fans mill about among food booths, a giant inflatable slide and merchandise trailers emblazoned with huge Cowboys logos. Fans can get in free, but they have to pay a one-time $20 fee for access to the fences where they have the best chances for autographs.

Even during the most mundane drills, fans shout encouragement, and during 11-on-11 workouts, they cheer big plays as if they were watching a game. When practice ends, they desperately try to get their favorite players to wander their way to sign footballs, jerseys, shirts and homemade signs.

“Kansas City has some good fans, supportive fans,” said cornerback Brandon Carr, who spent his first four seasons with the Chiefs. “But you know, Cowboys nation, it’s a different story.”